Using Citrix AppFlow, IPFIX or Flexible NetFlow to Monitor Social Media traffic is available today but, it shouldn’t necessarily be your company’s deterrent strategy. In fact, you may not want to stop the use of social media during work hours however, you may want your network monitoring solution to help you determine how much bandwidth social media consumes and who the top people consuming bandwidth with social media are.  After all, social media is not the problem.  Bad behavior might be.

Key myths many employees believe about social media:

 

• It’s protected under freedom of speech: Employees must understand that the First Amendment does not apply in the private workplace
• I can post whatever I want away from work: Firing employees for unsettling speech made outside of the workplace is usually legal
• I’m covered by the right to privacy: The right to privacy is different, and much more limited, in the workplace
• I only told the truth: If it harms the company, the truth of what was said may not matter

Legal Rights: Social networking site traffic
Avant Resources offers a video that covers the legal side of what action a company can take against employees who engage in social media abuse.  It answers tough questions like: Can companies fire disgruntled workers who trash-talk bosses, pay or work conditions on social media networks?

The first amendment of the United States constitution is not protecting all behaviors.  In their course they claim to provide insight on:

 

• The four-part test to ascertain legality of employment policies by the NLRB
• The legal limits of a social media policy
• How far employers can go in regulating off-duty conduct
• Steps to drafting social media policies that work for your company
• How and when it is acceptable to monitor employee activities
• Genetic Information Non-Discrimination — what to do if you learn of medical conditions via social media
• Why providing unlimited on-the-job Internet access poses risks for your company
• What to do — and not do — when social media postings disparage your company, products or reputation
• Social Media and confidential business information, misuse of company time, name, resources, offensive statements…

Monitor Facebook with NetFlow
Once everyone understands what is and isn’t OK to post on sites like Facebook we can then consider monitoring the traffic.  Our NetFlow collector reports on domains that could include thousands of IP addresses.  It also dynamically learns the IP addresses as they are discovered.  Nothing has to be defined.

I wouldn’t even consider a NetFlow or IPFIX reporting tool that forces you to enter ranges of IP addresses for a domain that you want to track traffic to.   IP addresses change and get passed around.  Statically assigning them to facebook.com means they could be out of date in no time.  If you define a lot of domains this way, it doesn’t scale as it is way to difficult to manage.

Notice above the pagination for all the IP which make up Facebook.com.  I can then change the report and find out who is receiving the most traffic from facebook.com.

If you have an nProbe or a SonicWALL exporting IPFIX, you can filter on both the domain and the end user and list the URLs the end system is hitting.  The nProbe was the first to offer URL and latency using IPFIX.  Citrix AppFlow then followed suit.  And, like the nProbe, AppFlow can also provide SSL details on encrypted connections.

I can change the report and provide details on how many megabytes were sent, etc.   A good NetFlow solution provides these details on social networking traffic.  Our network traffic monitoring solution can help you get a handle on social networking traffic.

Michael Patterson
Scrutinizer Product Manager
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Tags: citrix appflow, IPFIX reporting, monitor social media, monitoring facebook with netflow

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 2:30 pm and is filed under IPFIX, NetFlow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.